MEXICO – Now that life is getting somewhat back to normal, Veronica Dennis wants to follow through on a promise she made to many after her house caught fire in January.
Dennis is seeking help to find a place to display the large Virgin Mary likeness that was found on paneling in her kitchen after a charred frame of a palm-tree poster was removed from the fire-blackened wall.
“I promised a lot of people I would show them this, but I don’t know how to go about it,” Dennis said on Thursday outside her boarded-up, 2-story home at 4 Burton St. in Mexico.
“I’m not going to be charging admission, but I would like to do some kind of fundraising with it for the Mexico Firemen’s Relief Fund or the Red Cross fire fund,” she said.
Specifically, Dennis said she hopes someone who has a large, safe place in which the Madonna could be displayed for public viewing will contact her at 364-4231.
“I can’t afford to pay for it, but I feel it needs a large place if there is still as much interest as there was at the time it was found,” Dennis said.
A space heater, set up early on Jan. 15 in her daughter Tausha’s bedroom after heating oil ran out, ignited a bed and nearby dog bed. The fire destroyed the interior of the insured house.
After the fire was extinguished, Dennis and family members were allowed to remove personal items.
Dennis, who likes palm trees, had decorated her kitchen with the motifs, framed posters of palm trees and Egyptian curtains. When the charred frame of one palm-tree poster was taken down, the Madonna likeness was discovered behind it.
It glowed whitish blue on the blackened paneling in the sunlight streaming through a broken window in the bedroom where the fire began.
Mexico Fire Chief Gary Wentzell said at the time that it was created by smoke dust seeping around the picture frame.
The discovery created a buzz throughout the River Valley area that spread across the nation through subsequent media coverage.
Since the fire, the image, which Dennis had cut from the wall, has lost some of the detail that delineated a figure. But Dennis is still getting phone calls from people wanting to view it.
“The last call was from someone on a Down East island that I’ve never heard of,” she said.
Currently, with the insurance money in, Dennis has lined up a contractor to rebuild her house from the inside out.
She and her family, including their Maine coon cat, “Spaz,” who fled during the fire and returned after two weeks, have been living in a small trailer behind the house.
While examining the gutted interior on Thursday, Dennis said she continues to find evidence “of coincidences or miracles,” which she associates with the Virgin Mary likeness.
“My mom passed away almost six years ago, and she didn’t have a whole lot, but I took everything of hers, knickknacks, and they all survived the fire. There was even a bottle of holy water I’d taken from her apartment, and it didn’t even freeze, boil or burst,” Dennis said.
“But things next to them all melted, like the TV and a computer monitor. There was a (resin) Virgin Mary statue sitting next to a water cooler. The statue survived, but the cooler melted into one big piece of plastic,” she said.
The intense heat also curled and melted picture frames, but left pictures untouched. A kitchen ceiling fan, its blades black and melted downward, resembled palm tree fronds.
“It seems like it’s been forever, but it’s only been two months. We’re all doing fine, and we’re very grateful to people who’ve helped us out when we needed it,” Dennis said.
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